1. How it works (and how it doesn’t)

2. What is Second Life?
(It’s like first life, but you can fly.)

3. You can make your own stuff…

4. …and write your own software...

5. ... so it’s certainly not a game
(or a “site”).
World
Avatar
Game

6. Collaborative creativity
is the killer app...

7. ...but what do people DO
in Second Life?

19. Grey goo!
Robot picture goes here

20. Cut a hole in the world to stop the goo
Grey goo
Firebreak

21. One server re-compile later:
(We’ve subsequently installed space lasers and replication fences)

22. Back to our regularly scheduled
program...
22

23. 2007
SL is pretty big
2003
2005
2006
15,400 simulator processes
956 square kilometers = 8X San Francisco
~100 TB (over 1bn files) of user-created content
30 million concurrent scripts

24. How it works, today and tomorrow

25. SL (the software) has two primary
components: Viewer and Simulator
A Linden Lab
server
A user’s PC

26. The simulator
• Monolithic C++ application
• Linux
• 15,400 concurrent sims
• Fixed 256m x 256m size
• Havok Physics
• LSL Scripting
• Visibility Calculation
• Scene compression and streaming
• Closed source

27. The viewer
• Monolithic C++ application
• Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
• 50,000 concurrent viewers
• Creation tools built-in
• No client scripting
• No plugins
• Open source!
BTW: go download the code!

28. A simple plan

29. ...with global data

30. ...and permanent storage

31. ...and external communicatons

32. ...and it needs to scale

33. ...so not really simple, OR a plan

34. Legacy components

35. Time to modernize

36. (Ponder...)

37. SL is a World filled with Avatars

38. These could be self-contained units

39. For a larger scale

40. Toward a global platform

41. Second Life is a huge
success, and the more
people use it, the more
interesting it gets. What you
can do and be and create in
this virtual world is limited
only by SL technology, so
we will never stop improving
that technology. At the
same time, we recognize
that SL cannot truly succeed
as long as one company
controls the grid, so we
must work toward opening
the platform.
All of which is to say: we’re
only just getting started.

42. a tiny aside
The Second Life software is
built and maintained by a
50-person developer team.
The Second Life infrastructure
is built and maintained by a
12-person operations team.
lindenlab.com/employment
Poster and image by Michael Henderson

43. Questions?
Ian Wilkes
ian@lindenlab.com